The recent European elections have demonstrated that nationalism remains a galvanizing force whose presence seems to only increase with the growth of interconnected labor forces. Identification with the state, particularly through lines of heritage, history, and racial identification, serves as a rallying cry across the international arena.

The city operates not just as backdrop to public art but also as inspiration and a site and stage for opposition. While some artists enjoy what is possible in the city, others produce new lenses to understand its possibilities. The relation between artist and city is often performative–and like the city, these expressions range from grandiose to quietly intimate.

Public art today includes projects that strive to activate the civic beyond the level of aesthetics. These artists deploy forms of engagement that enliven and contest what is possible in the commons. These practices offer an alternative to formal modes of art production and a new sense of the role of culture in the composition of the urban landscape.

If the 1990s was the age of surveillance, then the current period has compounded this troubling sense of being watched. The recent revelations of NSA surveillance are exacerbated by the fact that self-surveilling has become the common language of contemporary life. As the private and public become deeply intertwined, their political and personal implications are increasingly conflated.

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV, Hito Steyerl, 2014

Courtesy of Hito Stereyl and Andrew Krepps Gallery

4:20PMSECTION 5: MIGRATIONS

Migrants are individuals caught between the boundaries of nation-states and the reality of international economics. These conditions place them paradoxically at the center of global politics and yet still at the periphery of international human rights. How are artists navigating and producing works at the heart of this paradox?